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Technology Stocks : Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Green who wrote (35715)	12/9/1999 3:28:00 PM
From: Don Green	Respond to of 93625

Rambus To Expand Beyond DRAM (12/09/99, 11:18 a.m. ET) By Andrew MacLellan, Electronic Buyers' News Rambus on Thursday appointed long-time senior executive David Mooring as its president, as the company strikes out in search of additional markets that demand high-speed chip-to-chip connections. Mooring, who was formerly vice president and general manager of the PC division at Rambus, Mountain View, Calif., will be tasked with overseeing technology development and marketing within the company's core markets. Former president Geoff Tate will remain with the company asCEO. Rambus also promoted Subodh Toprani to the new position of senior vice president. Toprani, who had been vice president and general manager of the Logic Products Division at Rambus, will work with Tate to identify new business opportunities. The company's broader focus will include the possibility of equity investments or outright acquisitions, as Rambus looks for technological challenges similar to the growing gap between CPU and main memory frequencies that propelled the development of its Direct Rambus DRAM program for the past three years. Tate said the move is not a departure for Rambus, but rather lies at the root of its business plan. "We're sticking to our knitting as we diversify," Tate said. "We're not doing anything different or new for us, so I think the likelihood of success should be high." While the company declined to offer specifics, Tate said fertile areas for exploration include the network communications sector, where bottlenecks occur between various components used in line cards for LAN/WAN-based switches and routers, such as the PHY IC, network processor, ASICs, and the backplane interface. PC I/Os, the CPU's front side bus, logic-to-logic interfaces in multi-processor server environments, and virtually any area where data must be shuttled from one device to another could fall within Rambus' expanded scope. "People have though of us as a DRAM company, and we have applied ourselves to the logic-to-memory bottleneck problem," Tate said. "But if you look at our prospectus, we have really always been a chip-to-chip connection company." To that end, Tate said Rambus is on the lookout for technology that will help it better understand a variety of end applications and hone the interconnect expertise it's developed through its Rambus DRAM development program. The company on Thursday will also disclose a technology road map for its Direct RDRAM memory interface, through which it will double the 800-MHz per pin data rate of existing Rambus chips in 2000. At the same time, Tate said, Rambus engineers are perfecting module-level improvements that will let designers increase the technology's 1.6 gigabyte per second board-level bandwidth by four times next year. Tate said the performance boost could come through the addition of multiple Rambus channels on the module, or other techniques, which he declined to specify.